Barclays Planning to Launch Apple Pay Support in UK in Early 2016

Apple Pay launched in the United Kingdom in July at more than 250,000 locations across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but Barclays remains notably absent from the group of banks supporting the mobile payments service.

Nevertheless, Barclays remains committed to supporting Apple Pay in the future. Barclays CEO of Personal and Corporate Banking Ashok Vaswani today told customer Mike Jobson by email that the bank plans to roll out Apple Pay in early 2016.

We have signed up for ApplePay and will launch it very early in the New Year. We truly value your custom and hope that you continue to bank with us particularly since we are launching this shortly.

A high-level executive at Barclays previously stated the bank anticipated "imminent" support of Apple Pay, and the bank later publicly confirmed it will support Apple Pay in the "future," but no specific launch timeframe had been provided.

Barclays is the only major financial institution of the "Big Four" banks in the U.K. that has yet to adopt Apple Pay. Participating banks include Bank of Scotland, First Direct, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, M&S Bank, MBNA, Nationwide, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and Ulster Bank.

Too late Barclays, I've already closed 2 accounts (had for 27 years), once my mortgage deal expires I'll be moving my joint acc and the mortgage to another provider (probably Santander as that's where I opened an account). Only 'issue' I have with Apple Pay is its too easy to spend!

Slightly off topic, but how is apple pay working in the UK? I ask because I heard that although all machines are NFC, there may still be differences that would prevent Apple Pay from working on some (older) machines.

Here in the US it is slowly (painfully so) getting better as vendors turn on their machines or add them in their retail locations (and yet require signatures and sometimes even IDs-- SMH).

I bank with Barclays and my wife with TSB. Our joint account was with the Co-operative Bank. Since none of those were in Apple Pay to begin with, and we'd been pretty disappointed with Co-Op, we moved our joint account to Santander.

So, we've been using Apple Pay for about 6 weeks now with our Santander joint account.

It's been great. Every terminal which I used to use my contactless debit card with has worked fine with Apple Pay.

Even the coffee man and sandwich lady who come to our office in their vans every day have 3G handheld payment terminals which work great with Apple Pay. Since the phone immediately pops up with the amount paid, there's no need to hang around to wait for the receipt to print (you're not going to want to return a sandwich or a coffee anyway!). Just beep and go.

My local newsagent (literally two doors down the road from my house) also supports contactless and Apple Pay. In the mornings the small shop's full of kids and adults buying stuff for their journey to school or work. You can absolutely fly through with contactless or Apple Pay. I'm generally crap at making sure I've got cash, so it's great now that debit card payments are actually much quicker than cash!

Very, very rough calculation: about 15% of eligible Apple Pay users in the US had tried the service as of June. In the UK, the iPhone has about 36% market share. If you assume 36% of Barclays' 12 million current account holders have iPhones, that's about 4.3 million customers. If you assume that 15% of those customers will be interested in trying Apple Pay, that's about 648,000 customers. And that's a very generous estimate, given that the market share figure includes devices that can’t use Apple Pay and people who won’t have bank accounts, e.g. kids. Also, only about 23% of those who’ve tried it before in the US were using it again in June when given the opportunity. Apply that to the hypothetical interested Barclays customers and that’s 149,040 customers, or about 1.2% of their retail customers who might even think about moving because of Apple Pay.

Figures all very rough and plenty of assumptions, but the long and short of it for me is that there was little incentive for Barclays to rush because the number of customers likely to jump ship is pretty minimal in comparison to their overall customer base. Plenty of other pressing things they should be tackling to retain customers, like their consistently lousy customer satisfaction ratings!

Obviously keen Apple Pay users will be over-represented on these forums, but I'm really struggling to believe that more than a few hundred customers, maybe low thousands, would go through the pain of switching accounts and changing bank cards just because Barclays delayed implementation of an embryonic payment system that doesn't do anything fundamentally new (i.e., it does exactly what contactless cards do, but in a more secure and possibly more convenient way).

(That said, once Apple Pay was announced they should have realised that bPay was dead in the water.)

Awesome to see apple pay taking off elsewhere. Hope it sticks around. I do like it just feels like most of the places I shop don't have it or it just doesn't work all the time. Mostly by fault of the store. Sometimes the machines seem like they aren't turned on all the time to accept it.

CM, when you went on your business trip with the AMEX/Apple Pay, did the charges show up as AplPay? I get that prefix on my purchases, but there is the vendor name on there as well. I think that Concur (my company's expense report service) may update their database and remove that prefix automagically, so we can automate the expense report.

Unfortunately my company (that also uses Concur for travel and Amex for the CC) told me that they are reviewing the Apple Pay thing and that we are not allowed to use Apple Pay at this time. These are the same folks that have turned off touch ID on Good for email. SMH - slow and conservative, we just upgraded to Explorer 11 last month by the way, so that's something. ARG!!!

Too late. Already switched a week ago. Love that quote though 'particularly as we're launching this shortly.' Sounds like 'particularly as we know most people have left and we hope you'll just stay pls.'

In short, I'm now a very happy First Direct customer and I've been using Apple Pay for about a week.

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